Conversations: White Ain't Right, How White Supremacy Uses Classics to Defend Bigotry with Curtis Dozier

Liv speaks with classicist Curtis Dozier about the troubling (and tragically unsurprising) connections between the world's worst people (white supremacists) and ancient Greece and Rome. Learn more about the White Pedestal https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300272734/the-white-pedestal/ book and the Classical Controversies https://www.sidestone.com/books/classical-controversies book mentioned. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Hey, hi, hello, all you wonderful people. Today, instead of one of our normal Tuesday episodes, we're actually having a fun little conversation episode. I say fun, it's not fun. Well, it is fun. It's interesting. Today, Liv spoke with Curtis Dozier about his new book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Used the Classics to Fuck Shit Up. Can you tell I don't have the book in front of me? Sorry. This is an important topic. I think we can all understand why, and it's amazing it's coming out on, you know, January 6 of all days. But this is something I think we talk about a lot on the show, but not in quite

• 1:51Speaker 00

  so much detail, not with somebody who has spent so much time with it. And it's really important. And I find, you know, a lot of the criticism we get is if you care so much about this stuff, why are you criticizing it? You know, why are you pointing out like, or saying that like, this is assault, or like, look how shitty and terrible these men are? And, you know, why aren't you in love with all of it? Well, here's the thing, everyone, when you love something, that's the thing you should be the most critical of. When you love a topic such as classics, or any topic, really, those are the things you need to be Critical of and mindful of and to pay attention to the way that they are being used and perceived by the wider public or by specific small groups, hate groups,

• 2:36Speaker 00

  that are getting bigger and bigger as the days go by. And I love this topic so much, you know, I think we can all agree on that. And it makes me so unbelievably angry to see these absolute cowards using it to justify their goddamn bullshit. It's exhausting. It is tiring. I don't want to deal with it, but yet we have to. So I think it is our duty to pay attention to the way of the things that we care about are used by others, whether that is, you know, classics being used by white supremacists to justify their absolute bigotry and bullshit, or indigenous land claims and indigenous treaty

• 3:21Speaker 00

  rights being used by certain groups around the world to justify their genocidal bullshit. We are allowed to be angry about these things. We are allowed to critique them. We are allowed to point out the backwards standards of it all. And that's why I'm really excited about this book, because I think it just opens the doors for us a bit more. This is not easy work. It's not stuff we want to be reading about. But I think it is important to understand how other people are perceiving things so that you can be better prepared

• 4:01Speaker 00

  when you meet them. Anyways, that's all I have to say. That was heavy. Sorry. Enjoy the conversation with Liv and Curtis Dozier. Bye.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Conversations: White Ain't White. How White Supremacy Used Classics to Defend Bigotry with Dr. Curtis Dozier.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Your book is so aptly titled, and I was kind of thinking about how we'd start this conversation because white supremacists using ancient Greece and Rome is something I've definitely talked about before. You know, we've covered Sparta and everything, but I'm so curious, like, how did you go about this topic? Like, what were you kind of exploring specifically? I don't know, like, we'll go into detail and everything, but maybe how did you get into this very timely, very important, and, you know, problematic-as-hell topic?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I got into studying white nationalism and classics without really knowing what I was getting into. The, in the kind of mid 2010s, 2016 is when it really started getting going. Classical scholars were noticing that the resurgent white nationalist movements in this country, that was a time when I think a lot of white Americans at least, were realizing that white nationalism, white nationalist activism was alive and well in this country. Classical scholars were noticing that these movements were fascinated by ancient Greece

• 5:59Speaker 02

  and Rome. And I was, I teach at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and we have as part of our curriculum here, a focus on what we call classical reception, familiar probably to many of your viewer, listeners. But if it's, but if it's not, it's kind of the study of how ancient Greece and Rome are used by different groups of people and in different time periods outside of antiquity. So we had a focus on that in our curriculum. I'd been teaching a lot of classical reception. And I think I recognized in white nationalist classicism, oh, this is an example of classical reception. Here we have

• 6:45Speaker 02

  You know, overt white supremacists using Greco-Roman antiquity to claim that racist politics are not only respectable but desirable, even even natural, certainly traditional. And so I recognized that as an example of reception. And I thought, oh, at that time, I was looking for a for a project. And I thought, well, maybe I can can work on this. And so with the with the advice of Donna Zuckerberg, who was a kind of pioneer in researching this phenomenon, I launched a website, Pharos, Doing Justice to the Classics,

• 7:28Speaker 02

  which you can find online at doingjusticetotheclassics.org or pharisclassics.org. I started documenting examples of hate groups using ancient Greece and Rome online. I launched that in 2017, and it's been going for about eight years now. And it forms the kind of the basis of the of the work that then I synthesized into my book, The White Pedestal. And when I started doing that work, I thought, what could these people possibly know about ancient Greece and Rome? I thought I was going to find gross distortions and

• 8:09Speaker 02

  misrepresentations of Greco-Roman antiquity, of ancient sources, of ancient political thought. And I did find a lot of those. And I thought my job as a scholar was to fight white supremacy by pointing out the inaccuracies in the in the ways that hate groups were using ancient Greece and Rome. And there are a lot of inaccuracies and superficial elements and even outright fabrications that you can find in chat rooms and on certain blogs and on social media and so on. There's a there's a lot of things that could be corrected.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  But the more I worked on this material, and the more I became familiar with the online ecosystem in which white nationalist activists move and share ideas, the more I

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Realized that there's a subset of people working in this space who know a lot about ancient Greece and Rome, who are very familiar with ancient sources, have done the research to learn about the existence of ancient sources that without modification, without distortion, articulate ideas, in some cases maybe congenial to white nationalist thought, in some cases identical to ideas that modern white nationalists would want to promote. And the book, The White Pedestal, is kind of my invitation

• 9:47Speaker 02

  to readers, classical scholars, and I hope members of the public, to kind of go on a similar journey from a point of assuming that white supremacists must be distorting history to realizing that, in fact, there is a lot of material from the ancient world that suits white nationalist politics very well. And with that realization, to think about what does that mean about the way we think about history, the way we value history? And ultimately, what does it mean about American culture writ large?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Because this is a country in which white nationalists aren't the only people invoking ancient Greece and Rome all the time. This is a culture, this is a society, a country, whatever you want to call it, in which ancient Greece and Rome is constantly and pervasively invoked for a whole range of ideas. And I kind of have this feeling that studying this kind of niche topic, how do white nationalists use ancient Greece and Rome, can help us see what's really going on in our larger national obsession with ancient Greece and Rome.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, that's, it's interesting that you're going at it like sort of from that, that specific perspective of, of, you know, them doing these readings kind of accurately. Um, and I think maybe it says something about like the, the circles I have on this show are just generally where my interest lies. But I'm like, oh, I, I, this is something I think about like all the time and I'm, you know, I had a lot of guests on to talk about the ways in which, in which white nationalists and just right alt-right terrible people in general, you know, use these things. But it's so, it's, I think, good to remember that by and large, that's not the mentality that most people have still. Like there, there is still this idea that, that, you know, they're just kind of getting it wrong.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And it's just sort of like this silly part of this otherwise horrible ideology. But I mean, it is so, it is so deep and they use classics in so many different ways. I don't know. This is something I think about just constantly. So I'm trying to form like a real, a real specific thought about it, but it's the, the, you know, I'm actually, I should, I should say too, I am Canadian. If, if you weren't aware of that, so I'm not, you know, I'm very much looking at

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Where we are, you know, the, the sibling that's just sort of following a few years behind in all of these things. So we have all the same, you know, issues, just smaller and earlier, I think in the stages. But, um, it's been something to watch, you know, from both countries to see the ways in which these symbols at, at, at minimum are used, you know?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  And, and we can see what happens with Canada. I hope you go a different way than, than we have. But you know, I think

• 12:44Speaker 01

  So do I.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  In 20, in 2015 and 2016, like, I mean, we're now doing this in 2025, right? In 20, we gotta think back to 2015 and 2016, right? Obama's been president for eight years. Um, that's a big, big thing. I don't know. There's just so much we didn't know. I think this did look silly. It did look ridiculous. But in 2025, we can see that using the ancient world to give, or we can see that using the ancient world to give prestige, to give respectability to white supremacist ideas and just the overall neo-fascist project of making.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Neo fascism respectable and desirable? We can see that it works because in 2025, we have the richest man in the world, Elon Musk tweeting to millions of followers, material from the ancient world to support xenophobia and other reactionary politics. We have a Speaker of the House in the third in line to the President, Mike Johnson, who in an interview has said that homosexuality destroyed the Roman Empire.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  We have Stephen Miller. He is the, he's the, you know, the architect of the, the president's, you can't even call it an immigration policy, but his like targeted harassment and violence towards immigrants in this country. We have Stephen Miller at Charlie Kirk's funeral. He, as part of his speech there invoked Athens and Rome as the ancestors of his movement. And, and we have President Trump, who doesn't say that much about Greco-Roman antiquity, but he signed all these executive orders about classical architecture, mandating classical architecture as the preferred architectural style. And he just knocked down a third of the White House,

• 14:38Speaker 02

  you know, one of the most symbolically important buildings in the, in America. He just knocked down the east wing of it and is rebuilding there. If you look at the plans, a classical temple. So what, what in 20, you know, I agree with you in 2025. I don't know if there's anybody who's like, oh yeah, this is, this is silly.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  But no, I more just mean that like it, it, it still has this level of like respectability as well. Like obviously, I mean, I agree there is still respectability. This is my whole career too. But like, you know, I think there are still these people that keep their head in the sand a little bit about those connections in, just in the way that, yeah, it's like, oh, well, it's, you know, they're just, they're just, you know, misreading or bastardizing the classics kind of thing. But yeah, no, certainly not, not silly.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And I get to, I get it. Like a lot of people don't like to think about it. And that's one thing I've been trying to do with my site, you know, since I launched in 2017. And one thing I'm trying to do with, with my book is invite people to try to take it seriously.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  And see, and see what they learn actually about themselves, the way I have by taking it seriously.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, well, it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, I'm curious to get into the specifics of sort of what you've been looking at. I'm curious about, as you were describing it, it just kept making me think about the ways in which, and certainly, you know, connecting back to Donna Zuckerberg of all people as well, like, the ways in which this has also been going on in the same ways, if not longer, in like, the misogynist specific spaces and the ways, you know, I think about Ovid's Ars Amatoria and the ways that that's used by pickup culture or this like incel culture, all of these horrifying things that are obviously also tied to white nationalism, to just generally these alt-right ideas. Like,

• 16:27Speaker 01

  have you looked at that side of it much? Or just the ways that those, you know, those things are connected? It's just all I kept thinking about is that the way it's also so deep in that space.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  So when I, when I launched Pharaohs, the site, we have documented a lot of misogyny on that site. And a lot of the material kind of in the same realm that Donna Zuckerberg wrote her book about. There's a 2018 book called Not All Dead White Men. I commend it to your readers. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a great and pioneering book about the kinds of things I'm, I'm talking about. One thing that I find interesting, though, about

• 17:09Speaker 02

  the white nationalist communities that I'm interested in, the activists that I'm interested in, again, returning this idea of making their ideas respectable and desirable, seem respectable and desirable. And they're using antiquity because it is a respected and admired period of history. So if they can find something in antiquity that fits with

• 17:32Speaker 02

  what they believe we should be doing, they kind of, they kind of, they, they invoke that so that people who admire antiquity will be like, oh, maybe we should take this serious, or maybe, maybe it's worth a thought, right, what they're saying. So this respectability is more important to them than anything else. And this is like, what's so scary about the people that I write about is that they're very smart politically, like, they understand that. The swastika is doing us no favors as a movement. Like, that symbol does not recruit well.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  They understand... Scholars often ask me, "What do they say about ancient slavery?" Well, they don't say a ton about ancient slavery because they understand that enslavement is a non-starter in the 21st century. Like, that's not gonna draw adherents advocating enslavement. They might actually think, "Yeah, maybe enslavement would be good for white people." And I'm sure they believe that, you know, some groups of people are, you know, inferior and maybe worthy of enslavement. But they don't say a lot about ancient enslavement because they understand that's not gonna, you know, get them anywhere.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  And similarly, you don't find a ton of misogyny of the kind that you find in the pick-up artist sphere or the incel sphere, where there's like really open hatred of women and description of them as, you know, duplicitous and irrational and evil and, you know, just all the vilifying of women. Because I think if you look at the history of white nationalist movements, there've been a lot of women involved in them.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. I think what I'm coming at it is this, like... Because what I see in all of the people you named earlier, for instance, you know, Mike Johnson and Stephen Miller and all of these people, is I also see the ways in which wives are being utilized and the ways in which marriage is being utilized. They're afraid of single women. That's what I mean. Like, that's the misogyny too, right? That's just in the same... It's so alive. And I mean, the Charlie Kirk of it all, and now Erica Kirk, is really amplifying all of those things.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  And so the way you see it is in a kind of like, more like an anti-feminism, I would say, than in a... Which is, of course, a form of misogyny. I don't wanna minimize that. But, you know, one of the first things I wrote on Pharaoh's was from a basically pick-up artist site, a post about... Or I wrote about a post on a pick-up artist site about how feminism caused the fall of the Roman Empire. And this was very early in the project. I was like, you know, I was really just documenting, not analyzing very much. So I just threw that out there. And I remember people were like... You know, groaning, outraged, laughing, can you believe the ridiculous stuff here? But then, you know,

• 20:44Speaker 02

  I returned to some of those ideas later when I was working on the book and you've and I was kind of like, where does this even come from? And you start looking at the ancient historians like Salist, like Juvenal. And you find them talking about how

• 21:06Speaker 02

  women in Rome getting more freedom, having more civic rights was corrosive, they claim, to the stability of the Roman Republic. And you find complaints about women not having enough children and how that's like weakened. These are in, these are in authentic ancient sources.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's the same stuff they say today.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  You find all those things, it's the same stuff they say today. And then you start looking to, well, like, how do people, like, how do people know what the ancient sources say? And I started reading the Cambridge Ancient History. This is a monumental, very significant kind of survey of ancient history. It's now in its third edition for many volumes. But if you look at the first edition from the early 20th century, they basically accept the claims of the, of the, of the ancient historians that women having fewer babies and having more sexual freedom and being able to own property and all those things weakened the aristocracy of Rome and led to civilizational decline. So, so here in a, you know,

• 22:18Speaker 02

  I don't know how you could name a more authoritative reference work than the Cambridge Ancient History. You know, they're basically repeating the claims of these ancient historians. And then those make their way into.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Any, any popular writer who consults the Cambridge Ancient History, including Will and Ariel Durant, who wrote this big 12-volume story of civilization. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their volume on the Enlightenment. It's been translated into, I don't know, 25 languages, millions and millions of copies sold. I don't know if anyone nowadays still, well, actually, I'll say something about that. You know, it's not as popular as it once was, but like when I was a kid, you used to go over to like, you know, bourgeois houses like I grew up around and they've got copies of that around and they use the Cambridge Ancient History. And so they, in this very popular work, are repeating these claims about the fall of the

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Roman Empire being connected to, to women's sexual freedom and so on. And, you know, fast forward to Phyllis Schlafly and the Equal Rights Amendment in this, in the United States. She more, this is, you know, in the, in the seventies, but this is a woman who more than anyone else opposed a constitutional amendment that would, you know, enshrined in our constitution, equal rights for, for women. And she opposed it and she made the argument that, you know, the modern feminist is like the Roman matron who destroyed the Roman Empire.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  And so, and then finally, Elon Musk is telling people, you should read Will and Ariel Durant if you want to know about Roman history. So, you know, these, these ideas, they, they persist.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, yeah, that's why I was curious how, if you looked at them in, in any way in the book, because it is something that's like so, yeah, it's just keeps going, you know, just sort of endless these ideas.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Misogyny is not a major theme of, of, of the, of the book, but there are plenty of examples there.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  In the, in it.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, so, I mean, you're the timing of the release, January 6th, very specific. Was that a huge portion? I mean, years ago, so I wish I'd re-listened before our conversation, but I had Stephen Hodgkinson on the show to talk about the use of Sparta specifically in, well, in just generally white nationalist and alt-right circles. But I know he was looking really closely at January 6th. So, not to say that I don't know anything about what he's done on it since then, but I more just mean how much did January 6th come into this? Obviously, there was a lot of symbolism there. Or were

• 25:12Speaker 01

  you just kind of looking at the wider time period that you've been looking at with Pharaohs and everything?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yes. Steve is a contributor to Pharaohs and a colleague and mentor to me over the years. And I'll just mention for your for your audience, if you're interested in Sparta and white nationalism, I of course say a lot in my book, but there's an open access book called Classical Controversies that has a lot of great, great, great articles in it. But Steve has a chapter on Sparta in there. That's a nice treatment. There's another treatment by, or another chapter on Sparta by this German scholar, Julia Mueller, in that book too. So that's open access. If you Google Classical Controversies, Sidestone Press.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  I feel like he, I think he might have mentioned it when I, yeah, that's great.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  So January 6th, I mean, to me, January 6th was significant because it was the first really high-profile demonstration of white nationalist classicism in this country.

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• 29:35Speaker 02

  So to me, January 6th was significant because it was the first really high-profile example of white nationalist classicism in this country. There were major events before that. The Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, I think, is a significant one. There were plenty of classical symbols there. I've also, I think, Identity Europa's recruitment on college campuses in 2017 and 2018. Maybe that didn't reach the kind of national consciousness, but that touched a lot of communities.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  What was that?

• 30:10Speaker 02

  These, this was a white supremacist group that was recruiting on college campuses, terrorizing college campuses by posting flyers with white nationalist slogans in them. And some of these flyers had used images of classical statuary. So there'd be like a port, a image of the Apollo Belvedere with the slogan, "Protect Your Heritage." They, there's the.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  There's a famous sculpture of Heracles, I can't think of the-

• 30:42Speaker 01

  The Farnesey?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  No, it's not the Farnesey one, it's a different, I was gonna say that-

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  It's a different famous Heracles that they used. So, so they, some of those used classical sculptures and, you know, they, they were on, I don't know, I, at one point I looked into it, I don't remember. I think it was, they visited close to fifty campuses, major universities and were flyer-ing there. Not always with classical sculpture on their flyers, but those were definitely in their flyers. So, that maybe, you know, I consider that high-profile in the sense that it touched a lot of, of communities. And then, you know, when I get invited to speak at universities, more often than not, Identia Europa had visited that university, so I can refer to it. So those were some big things. But here's the Capitol riot.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  I mean, okay, the Unite the Right rally, that was a horrifying and terrible event. Actually, one of the men who marched with a shield, with a hand, a handmade shield with an image of the Roman vasces on it is, is, is the person who murdered Heather Heyer and injured thirty-five other people at the Unite the Right rally.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  So that, you know, that, that's an important event. But I think that the, the Capitol, the attack on the US Capitol was another level in terms of its national significance and its profile. And I think at that point, it becomes impossible to deny that the white nationalist fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity has real-world consequences.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  So, you know, at that attack, there were plenty of undeniable white supremacist symbols. Someone hung a noose on the Capitol lawn. There are pictures of people flying the Confederate flag inside the, the US Capitol. And, as I wrote about on my site, and actually, a young scholar Spencer McDaniel has a great post about it, too, that came out before mine.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  There were rioters who wore Spartan-style helmets in the attack. And there were people who flew flags with the phrase "Molon Labbe", which I'm sure came up when you were talking to Steve Hodgkinson.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  The ancient slogan, "Come and take them", that's been adopted by anti-government and pro-gun groups.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  And I am always just required to say, even if it's a little tongue-in-cheek, but like, the Persians did take them. I just can't fathom, yeah, you know, I know it doesn't mean anything anymore, but it's just so on-its-face silly.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there was another guy who had a big banner that said, "Cross the Rubicon, President Trump", you know, referring to Julius Caesar's marching his army on Rome and establishing himself as a dictator. So there were a bunch of classical symbols there, too, in a site of real-world violence on the, you know, at the center of American politics, right? I think you could still, it was hard, but you could still write off the "Unite the Right" rally as like, "Okay, these are a bunch of anti-Semites and neo-fascists who got together, this like weird fringy thing." But I don't think it's possible to call an attack on the US Capitol trying to invalidate the democratic processes

• 34:01Speaker 02

  by which President Biden was elected, a fringy thing. It showed us that, you know, that kind of violence and willingness to engage in violence is a mainstream phenomenon. And it showed us that Greco-Roman antiquity is there. And again, if I could just circle back to this theme of respectability, it's kind of like, the significance of Greco-Roman antiquity is, the significance of Sparta there is, you know, it's a, I think it's a leap for most people to attack the capital of their nation and try to subvert the democratic processes. How does someone convince themselves to go through with that? And the way they do it is they convince themselves

• 34:46Speaker 02

  that it is glorious, heroic, noble, and necessary. And Sparta, the symbolic...

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Landscape of Sparta, the way it's represented, I would say, in the ancient sources, undistorted, and the way it's been represented in historical work on Sparta. This is what Steve Hodgkinson's book, the chapter I mentioned is all about, is how, actually, it's not all about, but it has a big section about how scholars have perpetuated this view of Sparta. Even those who criticize Sparta for its hyper masculinity, for its abuse of men, have sort of perpetuated the idea of it as a, like, military superstate. Anyway, if, if you've got a historical tradition that treats Sparta that way, if you've got ancient sources that treat Sparta that way, if across the United States there are high school sports teams called the Spartans, including-

• 35:41Speaker 01

  That was my high school, even in Canada. Like, my high school was the Spartans.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  There you go, right? You know, it's just a very admired symbol. And, and, you know, that's, it's everything from, it's everything from a high school sports team to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you know, who looked, who in, you know, one of the architects of the modern nation-state as a concept, you know, looked at Sparta as like, this is the place where, you know, people were really committed to community, and that's the kind of citizenship we want to have. So, so the entire history of the interpretation of Sparta is, is one of, of basic admiration. And so, it makes, to me, it makes perfect sense that a certain number of people who want to see what they're doing as taking a heroic last stand to save their civilization

• 36:28Speaker 02

  from, you know, illegitimate tyrannical ruler,

• 36:35Speaker 02

  that they would, that Sparta would inspire them, that they would turn to Sparta to legitimize that violence.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  And so, you know, the January 6th, you know, that was the publisher's decision to have the book released on the fifth anniversary. I love them for it, you know.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  I just realized it had been five years when I was looking at that date before our call. I could, I, I feel like I blinked. But that's, yeah, and I, I mean, that's something that it's good it's still being talked about five years later, you know, even if it is specifically tying it to January 6th as that reminder of, of that because, yeah, I mean, as you said, it certainly wasn't, you know, hidden in any way by the time that came around. And I just have to say, like, you know, I don't have a question attached to this necessarily, but I hadn't thought about the kind of backdrop of it all to, you know, the neoclassical buildings that they were, you know, storming amongst all of this, you know, that's not even intentional,

• 37:36Speaker 01

  but it's so deeply tied with just how deeply tied, you know, the classical world is with not, not just white nationalism, but also like the foundations of very much, I mean, this, the states and I think a lot of the sort of colonial North America generally.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. There's a great article on that point, a, a, an online article at Hyperallergic by a scholar, an art historian named Lyra Montero, called, it's, it's, it's called How a Trump Executive Order Aims to Set White Supremacy in Stone on Hyperallergic. Maybe you can throw it in the show notes if you have such a thing.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  The, but what it's really about is the Capitol riot and the link between classical architecture as a backdrop to that and white supremacist activism. And it's, it's one of, as I, as I said at the beginning, the move I'm trying to make in my book, and Dr. Montero was way ahead of me in figuring this out, but the move I'm trying to make in my book is to show examples of what might be termed extremist action.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Whether it is the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the people chanting, "Jews will not replace us," while carrying shields, homemade shields with symbols of the Fasces on it, extremist action, or the January 6th riot even.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  What I'm trying to do in the book is lead people, as I have been led by examining this material, to realize how deeply rooted the way of thinking about the ancient world that we see in white nationalist circles is in our mainstream culture. And I think that classical architecture is a great example of that. So, you know,

• 39:41Speaker 02

  you go to, as an American, you either go to Washington DC on a school tour, or at the very least, you see images of it in school, and you learn to think of those buildings, the Capitol Building, the classical columns of the Supreme Court, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, all of these are classicizing buildings. The Washington Memorial is an obelisk, which is sort of Egyptianizing, I would say, but I think it's imported from the sort of classical use of the obelisk.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, that's the Rome, Roman obelisk.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. You learn to, you learn to think of that architectural style as integral to the, to the identity of our nation as a democratic nation, as a, you know, all these like cliches of, of what America is, as a nation of immigrants, you know, a beacon of democracy, a revolutionary democracy, any, any of those things. You learned, you learn to think of classical architecture as a symbol of the ideals of our nation.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  But it's actually kind of surprising that this colony in the "new world" would have that architectural style. There's no link between this place and Greece and Rome, except one that's a fantasy, except one that was created by the people who decided that the symbolic landscape of this nation should be a classical one. And that choice to create a link between

• 41:35Speaker 02

  the new nation of the United States and that part of the ancient history of Europe is a settler colonialist move. Because what it does is it denies and erases whatever history, whatever aesthetic principles, whatever civilizational elements were present here, and it replaces them with one that is imported in the name of creating this link. So that when we're taught, "Oh, these sculptures or these buildings and this architectural style embodies the democratic principles,"

• 42:19Speaker 02

  that's a distraction, that's a misdirection from the way that they also, and I would say more strongly, represent the imposition of a white European model on what we now call North America.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  And that's how that's how classics works in politics for the most part is you have something that is that that is so associated with ideals, whether it's, you know, the Enlightenment of ancient Athens, the Greek miracle so-called, whether it's the the rule of law in Rome and the and the, you know, Roman legal theory that, you know, is sometimes claimed to be foundational to to to modern law. All these kind of high-minded admirable ideas that we say the ancient world represents makes the ancient world a very powerful tool to disguise violence and genocide and

• 43:26Speaker 02

  destruction and exploitation. And that's basically what I'm saying in the book White Nationalists are doing, right? Is that they are like, well, we want to, we want to stop President Biden from being elected. Let's put on Spartan helmets and, you know, make it look like a glorious and heroic act. Okay, maybe that's maybe that's easy to poke holes in. But on the other side of that is the entire settler colonial project of this nation, which uses classics for exactly the same purpose, which is to turn attention away from violence and oppression in and replace it with

• 44:05Speaker 02

  claims of high-minded political ideals. And by the way, that's why I don't make fun of Donald Trump's executive order, the latest one, making classical, you know, making federal buildings beautiful again. Because that executive order says, you know, it begins by saying that the founders in line with great societies before them attached great importance to federal civic architecture. Fine. They wanted America's public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue, right? It turns to this idea of like, the buildings are connected to civic ideals. And they modeled the most important buildings on the classical architecture of ancient

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Athens and Rome. They sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary republic with the antecedents of democracy and classical antiquity. That's what his executive order says. And I think some people who are reading that, they'd be like, well, that's like Orwellian doublespeak here, you know, how how could the most authoritarian president in the history of this country be talking about antecedents of democracy and civic virtue? But all he's doing with that executive order, or the people who wrote it, all they're doing is talking about classical architecture in the completely normal, American way of talking about classical architecture.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that could have been written 40 years ago and been one of the same thing. Like, it's dumb in terms of just, like, make it beautiful again. That's objectively stupid. But other than that, like, yeah, it sounds like a, actually, an accurate description.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  So I went, I went on the, let me read you something from the webpage of the Architect of the Capitol, which is, which is a, is a office. It basically says that the, you know, because this is the sort of office that takes care of the National Mall and these monuments and everything. And it says, it describes all the monuments as awe-inspiring facilities that comprise these monuments to American democracy that evoke the ideals that guided the nation's founders as they framed their new republic. That's the Architect of the Capitol. But you know what? That's not the Trump Architect of the Capitol. That's from the Obama Architect of the Capitol. So, you know, that's just, that's just how we always talk about the architecture.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  And so when, when, when Trump writes his executive order mandating classical architecture and cites in the press release or whatever, the, this survey done by this group that is, you know, rumored to be the ones that are pushing this executive order, the National Civic Arts Society, they did a survey that says that 72% of Americans, majorities across all political, ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, 72% of Americans prefer traditional architecture for federal buildings. I believe them. I don't think that's some faked, you know, right-wing pull. I actually think Americans do want classical architecture because we've been taught so

• 47:06Speaker 02

  strongly for our entire lives that this is, these, this is representative of our national identity. And it's actually much more comfortable to believe that than it is to be like, these are symbols of the genocide of indigenous peoples and the settler colonial status of this country.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Well, and not to get too dark as a reaction to that, because you're completely right. But like, those two things are so tied, too. Like, those two things are unfortunately one and the same, not to the individual now's fault. But like, yeah, the, I mean, it's the same for Canada, right? Their national identity is synonymous with the historical genocide of the indigenous people.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%. So, thank you for making that clarification. I think the point I'm just trying to make is that the classical, the prestige of the classical is the kind of mechanism by which that fact is effaced, or disguised, or distracted away from, such that...

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's really interesting.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Such that, you know, I see a real parallel between that kind of thing, which is happening in the dominant culture, and the way that white nationalists use the ancient world.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, I think about the classical architecture all the time, obviously, but it's always, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's also just the fact that they, you know, in that colonial style, also got rid of all the color, or the color was already worn off, or whatever, for whatever reason. But it's also just so, like, painfully, you know, on the nose, that all of these buildings are also considerably whiter than they would have been in the ancient world.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Yes, right, yeah, yeah. Although, you know, my take on this is, can I say something, can I say something about them? Because it's true, right? You know, both sculpture itself, like what Identity Europa used in the flyers that I discussed a little while ago, you know, they're representing the sculptures the way they appear in museums, as this, like, white marble, and they're doing it in support of white supremacy, seemingly unaware, or at least ignoring, that the sculptures were painted in antiquity. They didn't, they wouldn't have looked like that. And that's true of a lot of the buildings, too. You know, there's a lot of painting on the buildings, and you can find the pigments and everything. And so, I'm not as, I'm not as...

• 49:36Speaker 02

  You see that objection being made pretty often, especially for Identity Europa. This is why I think of them, is that the press around Identity Europa using classical sculpture from classical scholars and also in the art press, they pointed that out. They pointed out the polychromy, as we say, I never know how to say that word, but the colorful nature of these ancient sculptures. They pointed that out as a way of trying to weaken or criticize the use of those sculptures in support of white nationalist politics. And to some extent, it's true. So you can look at art history and Johann Winkelmann, the father of art history, who

• 50:19Speaker 02

  sort of contributed to the fetishization of white marble. I think he wrote something like, "The whiter it is, the more beautiful it is," or something about these sculptures. So there's this whole history of whitewashing in quite a literal way, even to the level of sometimes removing the paint of whitewashing these sculptures. And it's very clearly connected to racial logics and everything. So bringing that up does challenge what Identity Europa is doing. But on the point of my book, which is, sometimes I joke, the one-sentence version of my thesis is, "These people are smarter than you think." The people I'm interested in, they know that the ancient sculptures were painted. They're not trying to hide anything.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  They know they were painted, and they know that they were painted, at least the skin of the people, was painted with a color that we would analyze as the skin color of white people, the modern racial logics were. And so there's this gleeful headline on this anti-immigration website that says, "Ancient sculptures weren't white, they were pink." And then, is it like making fun of the people who think that the colored sculptures undermine the white supremacists used of them? And the reason I bring it up is because it points to how the problem...

• 51:41Speaker 02

  is not something to do with Greco-Roman antiquity. The problem is that many, many people still assume, or still accept, the logics of racist pseudoscience, which claim, first of all, that race is a biological category, and that claim that the color of your skin, the genetics that produce your phenotype, that produce how you look, has any link to anything else about you. You know, white supremacist race pseudoscience says that the genetics that produce white skin also produce higher intelligence, greater courage, better morality, greater creativity, all these, all these lies. Where? Basically, there's no link, there's no link between No evidence.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  that produce skin color. In fact, there's greater genetic variety among people who have the same skin color than there is between people with different skin colors. Hmm. In any case, so that's a, that's a racist lie, this, this idea of race is a genetic, genetic reality. But as long as people believe that, I don't think the ancient sources, I don't think the ancient sculpture of, or let me, let me put that a different, let me put it positively. As long as people believe that racist lie, I think ancient sculpture does look like the art of white people.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  It does look like representations of, of, of white people. And, and I think Identity Europa understands this. That's why they, you know, and that's why the, the people really know their ancient history in white nationalist circles. They don't mind that the sculptures are painted because they're painted in ways that most people would analyze, oh yeah, that's a white person. These claims of ancestry are, are correct. But the claims of ancestry are never just about like, oh. I have the same genes that produce white skin as ancient people had. It's all, it's about everything else. I have, I'm an inheritor of their superior intelligence, of their enlightened political philosophy, of their superior creativity, all these, all these things that have no genetic basis, at least in connection to your, your skin color.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  And certainly not over many, many, many generations, right? Like, okay, maybe if your mom is really creative, you have a decent chance of being really creative yourself. But we're talking about genetic mixing over thousands and thousands of years. There's a lot of, there's a lot of mixing that, that takes place over, over that period. So, you know, that I, I, that's one point I make in the book is that we got, we gotta,

• 54:21Speaker 02

  we're not going to be able to challenge white supremacy on the basis of antiquity. Antiquity, at least as it is, at least as it survives and has been curated by the, by the dominant culture, I would say on balance, it actually probably does support white supremacist politics. The way we're going to challenge this is by challenging the belief in racist pseudoscience in our, in our civil, in our society. We're going to challenge it by challenging the belief that difference causes violence in our, in our society. The way I actually organized the book is around six ideas that white nationalists use the ancient world to support, one of which is race is a biological reality. Another one is difference causes violence and so on.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Those are the ideas we need to challenge. There's a lot of, what I show, or I hope I show, is there's a lot of ancient material that seems to support those ideas. And we're, we're just not going to get very far by trying to say that antiquity doesn't support it. Instead, we got to be putting our efforts and our work into challenging those ideas. And then we can see what we, what antiquity looks like and what it can mean once it's not being analyzed in a white supremacist.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Milieu.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm thrilled to hear about that sort of end goal of it. I mean, that's something, yeah, I try to talk on the show as often as possible, just about the ways that all of that was very much still from the ancient world, you know, we are not, we're not valorizing them here. I love Greek mythology and also it's problematic as hell amongst all of the ancient history, you know, and all of that. But it, yeah, it's, it's such an interesting thing and I, I have to say, I don't, I don't think it's necessarily helpful to be like pointing out that statues were painted. I more think it's just like delightfully, I want to say ironic, but in the modern usage, not the literal usage of the word ironic, that like, that the buildings are quite so much whiter

• 56:20Speaker 01

  than they would have been, you know, but it's like, is that helpful? Absolutely not, because it's also the type of people who are, you know, I don't know, I don't think necessarily critiquing, like, accuracy in those ways really benefits anybody except just like you feeling like, oh, I'm smarter because I know the answer or whatever, you know.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  And sometimes, sometimes I feel it's like, even if it's true and more accurate, if the entire history of interpretation and celebration of those monuments made them, made them white, like, you know, it's gonna be hard to overcome that by, you know, and the damage has been done.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. And I mean, it's like the, the damage on, on, you know, white supremacy and it, the way it has bled into the study of the ancient world, like, it's, it's done, you know, we, we do have to like, be more recognizing of those things. And, you know, it sounds like that's exactly what you're trying to do is like, establish that that is not, yeah, some fringe idea, you know, I think, I think it's so important that, I mean, people in the field in any way are recognizing that these problematic things exist, because if you just pretend that people aren't, you know, using the ancient world in this way, and that the ancient world isn't so easily interpreted this way, because it was, you know, that it's, it's so easy, I think, and, and so many.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  I think parts of this world still do just put it up on this pedestal of like this untouchable greatness. I think about this because the new Odyssey movie is going to come out and I am, I don't know what I, I am not optimistic even in the tiniest bit, but it did get me a book, so it's fine. Um, but you know, it's, it, it, it's something that I think more and more, we need to be recognizing these ties to those issues. And I mean, yeah, it's.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  The Christopher Nolan Odyssey movie is a, is a, is interesting to me because of how it, what it sort of reveals about,

• 58:24Speaker 02

  about our society's fascination with ancient Greece and Rome. I think at the top of the show, I said, the US is a society where ancient Greece and Rome is pervasive. Not just in white national circles, it's pervasive. And in a way, the Christopher Nolan movie, which is not even out yet, it's pretty far from coming out. But there was already, there was already press about it, you know, years before, at least two years before it was going to be released. You know, I remember seeing an article, it was like Christopher Nolan is making an Odyssey. And I was like, oh, I better put this on my calendar to see it. When's the release date? And it was two years in the future.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and now this time last year, I'm getting like all these flashback memories.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  And I, you know, what other, what, okay, Christopher Nolan's a big name director, sure. But you know, short of like Star Wars or like a Lord of the Rings sequel.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  I was gonna say a Marvel movie, but no, probably not a Marvel movie. Like what other, what other like intellectual property, if we could use the term, gets, gets press years before its release? Well, the classical does because it's like seen as like, wow, this is really significant. Isn't it going to be interesting to see what this famous director does with this famous story? Right? And so, so you know, this is the, um, this is the, the world the white nationalists are operating in. So of course they use ancient Greece and Rome. It's, it's just ready made for them, right? The ancient writers like Plato, Aristotle, Salist, Juvenal, they're just full of white nationalist ideas.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  And so the white nationalists are looking, looking at the US and other places where classics is held in high esteem. And they're like. Here we have a society that admires and is fascinated by the ancient world. And it's a thing that lends itself really well to our politics. So of course they're gonna, of course they're gonna use it. Of course they're gonna exploit it.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and that's, I mean, I'm kind of glad I brought up the Odyssey because I think, I mean, I'm going to be very paying a close attention to how that movie does kind of end up getting tied in with the white nationalist side of classics, because I think it'll be really easy. I mean, with a guy like Matt Damon in the role like it's, it's wacky. But yeah, and I think, I think right now, yeah, it's more and more. I think there are sort of, that stuff is being done out loud in a way that it was kind of a little quieter before. And it'll be interesting how that kind of shakes out. I mean, even if, yeah, alongside a Hollywood movie, but God.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  Do you know this, um, do you know this English scholar Alexandra Sills?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, yes.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I just saw her give a great paper. I, if you haven't had her on our show, she's really good.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Many times. Yeah, no, we're friends.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, good.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  I just saw her give a great paper about, um, sort of reaction, fan reactions to Gladiator two.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  And how the perceived wokeness, I hate to use that word, but the perceived wokeness of that film led many fans who had, you know, loved the first Gladiator, which really lends itself to kind of white nationalist interpretations, right? The, the lone man, maintaining civic virtue and, and integrity and honor amidst a degenerate empire, right? That's just the, that's just like such a neo fascist script. Anyway, you know, anyway, uh, Dr. Sills gave a great paper about how, how part of the bombing of Gladiator two was reactionary criticism of its perceived,

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  which were not that strong, but it's perceived of its perceived wokeness, right? It was not that woke a movie.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Like two women.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. So, so you know, you gotta, you gotta wonder if somebody like Christopher Nolan is thinking about that and is kind of like, well, I'm, I'm not going to take any risks. I want my movie to do well. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a politically reactionary movie. We will see.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Oh, the Odyssey, though, of all the things. I just wish you'd taken anything else.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

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• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  But the white nationalists love the Odyssey. They love, they love the Odyssey because, you know, they see it as the journey. They see Odysseus as the kind of like archetype of the white man surviving by his wits in a world of hostile foreigners and returning home to find his home full of outsiders and righteously murdering them and reinstalling himself where he should have been as king the whole time. And yeah, I mean, it's a disgusting reading of it. And yet it's not that far from the way the poem has usually been read, even to the point of the early colonizers of North America. They used the polyphemus episode.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  You can find this in Christopher Columbus and, and other, other colonizers. They used the polyphemus episode as a way of kind of predicting that they were going to find. Cannibals and savages on these islands as a way of justifying the, you know, the extermination and enslavement of, of those people.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that episode is really overtly colonial, though it's bizarre. I actually, I mean, disclosure, I have a children's book of the Odyssey coming out to time with the movie. That's why I joke, I'm not looking forward to the movie, but I did get a book deal. And it's, it's with a big publisher. So I'm, I'm kind of readying myself for the people who are angry that I did not write Nodisius, anything like that. It's more of the lying liar who, of the actual Odyssey. But you know, yeah, it's, it's that, that point, it, when he reaches the Cyclops, like there's this long and detailed thing about how they're like barbaric because they don't have the same laws and because they don't have the same family life. Like it's so overtly xenophobic that you're just like,

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  yeah, of course. Like this, this is, it's been in our culture since the beginning, even in something that is, is like otherwise pretty like decent as Homer.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Isn't that, isn't there even a remark, something about how he didn't make good use of the land? Like he wasn't practicing agriculture, right? Is all the things, is all the things that the colonizers said about the indigenous people of North America, like they're not really, they're not really using the land well. So let's displace them and make good use of it. It's all there in, in the, in the polyphemus episode in the Odyssey.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I didn't know, I didn't know the connection to Columbus, which is good to know and horrifying. But I have, I have recently talked about how troubling that select section is because you're right. It's, it goes into really specific detail about how they, they're not deserving of respect because they don't follow like all the exact same customs as the Greeks. It's, yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, it is, it's, it, I think it's so important to be sort of, like always when we're talking about classics, to be at least having that on i- in some part of the conversation or some kind of recognition of it. Because I think the more that we pretend that it was this like totally different, separate place where, you know, where we just got all of

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  the wonders of quote unquote, Western civilization, you know, the longer we, we treat it like that, the more. We're not going to be learning from the mistakes we're already making, you know, over and over again. Not to.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I'm really excited about that, the children's book of the Odyssey. I know you're gonna do it right. So that's really cool.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  It's, it's, we're towards the end of it and it's going, I'm very proud of it. It's gonna be really fun and like distinctly close to the original, but for like eight year olds. So, yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, but well, I, I mean, we've, I think, feel like we've covered so many things, but is there anything that, you know, that you have in this book that we didn't get to talk about that you'd really like to mention? Not to put you on the spot either.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I've, I've tried to work in my, the main things I want to call attention to.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  About it. I mean, there's just, there's just so many. There's so many more examples we could use. I think that, you know, I tried to include surprising things. I tried to include provocative things. Um, some, some people have read advanced copies of, have told me they were surprised, for example, to find that the white nationalists do not like Alexander.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  Of Macedon, right? You would think that this military leader who conquered a vast empire would be a great model for them. And they're, and some of them, you know, call him like the embodiment of Aryan dynamism and, and stuff like that. But in general, he's seen as like a globalizer.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Whoa, I was gonna guess that he was like too gay, which is sad, but you know.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, they, they actually, uh, there's a, again, I mean, that's, that's one thing I was kind of surprised to, surprised to learn. I mean, it's, it's controversial. It's a very homophobic movement. So there's like division around it, but you know, the really scary people in, in white nationalist activism, I think they kind of understand like, it's not helping us to be so homophobic. There's a lot of white gay people who actually might get on board with our politics if we, uh, if we, you know, spoke to them in a more open way. And one of the people arguing this, um, who has a PhD in philosophy. He points to Achilles and Patroclus, he points to Alexander, all these, you know,

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  sort of ancient men who had homoerotic relationships with other men. And he says, "Why shouldn't we, if Achilles and Alexander had sex with men, like, why shouldn't we welcome gay people into our movement?" You know, I don't know if this person's gonna get anywhere with that argument, but, but, you know, and again, antiquity is there. So Alexander is seen as a kind of like person who, you know, yes, he was a brilliant military commander, but that he like succumbed to race mixing. And in fact, you know, created the like cosmopolitan degenerate, mongrelized empire as they would see it. You know, the first globalist is the view of Alexander.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  So that kind of, that surprised me to find, and I include that in the book. You know, another thing, this is a little out of order, but going back to your question about the misogynist movements, one thing, one thing that emerges really strongly in the study of misogyny and Greco-Roman antiquity is the fascination with Roman Stoicism in misogynist communities, right? Because, and it's not a bad fit, because Roman Stoicism is a philosophical mode that views women as irrational and emotional, and, you know, is a very heavily gendered view of, like, what a person should be like, they should be more like a man if they want to be happy. So

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Roman Stoicism fits that very well. But, you know, the white nationalist activists are not interested in Roman Stoicism. And in a sense, this is a, this is a example, and in fact, they're very critical of Roman Stoicism. And this is an example of how I sometimes think that the white nationalist activists, they see the ancient world maybe more clearly even than some professional scholars. Because unlike, I would say, the kind of, you know, even just the mainstream promoters of Roman Stoicism, the white nationalists understand the historical milieu in which Roman Stoicism emerged, which was in the cosmopolitan Roman

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Empire, when traditional hierarchies and structures were sort of fading away, and there was greater social mobility for people that were outside of the traditional aristocracy.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  And so they see Roman Stoicism as a kind of product of a cosmopolitan society that they do not like, that they, that they think is actually a degenerate society. And so if Roman Stoicism is popular in the present age, they think that's a bad thing. They think that's a symptom of a, of a society that has like lost its traditional structures, that has become too cosmopolitan, too diverse. And, and, and so they, they reject the popularity of, of Roman Stoicism. Again, not from a kind of knee jerk way, but from a position of deep understanding of where Roman Stoicism come, came from and why it was popular in the, in the first place.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really interesting. Do you think that's why they're, I mean, well, obviously there's a lot of things that go into why Sparta is so important, but I feel like that anti-globalist absolutely fits in with that.

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, they're, they, to them, Sparta, and to some extent Athens, I mean, this is, this maybe we don't have time to talk about this, but they love ancient Athens because it was a very, very xenophobic society, right? Pericles, Pericles established it so that, so that basically no outsider who didn't have two Athenian parents could ever become a, become a citizen. And they subjected outsiders to a special tax and special surveillance by citizens and special legal penalties if they tried to participate in the, in the civic life of, of the city. You know, it was basically a, it was basically a city where any outsider, any foreigner, any immigrant was relegated to second-class status. And so the white nationalists can look at Athens and they say, see, you know, relegating

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  outsiders to second-class status and preventing them from ever obtaining citizenship is completely compatible with democratic institutions. This is the birthplace of democracy, they, they, they can say. But, but Sparta too, you know, they look at Sparta and they see a model of the racially pure ethno-state, which they wanna, which they wanna form, the opposite of the, of the cosmopolitan Roman Empire, the, or the. Hellenistic empires.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  And yeah, definitely, definitely Sparta is a, that's one of the big drivers of their interest in Sparta. It's not just the like hyper masculinity of the, of the Spartan warrior. It's actually, I think even much more. And again, this is all taken from ancient sources, um, which we, which, you know, many people think are just a fantasy of Sparta, but it's there in the ancient sources. You know, they're much more interested in the sort of xenophobia of Sparta. Like Hurgis's prohibition against Spartans ever living abroad because they would become too luxurious. His prohibitions against foreigners spending the night in Sparta. You could maybe do business here, but you had to be gone by nightfall. There's a, there's a line, I think in Xenophon where, where he says that they're, they used to have just mass expulsions from, from Sparta,

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  periodically to get all the outsiders out. They're right, you know, they, they find a powerful model for the way they think society should be organized in Sparta. And we can all day long be like, oh, the Spartans were, they were loved by the Nazis and they murdered their slaves as a rite of passage. And they traumatized their young men and they practiced slavery. And we can say that all day long and the, the white nationalists are like, yeah, those are good things.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Their civilization also completely died out because they wouldn't like expand their birth or their.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that gets, that gets talked about less. That gets talked about less.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  I would imagine. I'm really interested to hear that about Athens, though, because, I mean, it, it very much fits the argument that you've been mentioning. It's just this, that they know more than, than you kind of expect because I feel like, I mean, that, I mean, not that Athens would have been known as like particularly metropolitan, but I would have assumed because it has, you know, the arts and culture side of it, that it would have been less appealing. But them having such in-depth knowledge of, of the actual democratic principles of Pericles and everything like, and, and being able to link back to that, like, that's very honest in a way that I feel like people rarely talk about Athens. Like even, you know, deeper in classical circles.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Right. And the art and culture allows them to say, and see this xenophobic society had all the most beautiful, all the most beautiful art and, and great philosophy and everything. So, so don't we want to have all of that? Maybe we should be more like Athens.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow. Well, there's these little posters up in my neighborhood and like literally always, at least for the last year, promoting philosophy and they always have a statue of

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Marcus Aurelius and I am perpetually terrified of those, but now at least I know that they're probably not also white nationalists. They're just misogynist philosophers. So I guess we've got, you know, it's 50% less terrifying.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  Hey Liv, we gotta, we gotta find hope where we can in 2025.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. Oh my God. No, it's, yeah, that's, it's, I'm interested, those, those examples are fascinating. I mean, I, it's just all so dark. Everything's so, so, I wanted to say delightfully dark just to make it sound happier, but it's not particularly delightful. Well, I'm, this has been really interesting. Thank you so much.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  I wish, I wish I could tell your listeners to buy my book for a fun summer read or as a great gift for your, great gift for your uncle.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it might be.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  It's not, yeah. If your uncle is in a place where they wanna do that kinda like reflection about the way they think about ancient history and what it tells them about themselves, then by all means, give it to them. But, you know, I do think it's a really, um, there's a lot of surprises, a lot of twists and turns. At least I tried to put them in. So, you know, I hope, I hope people will give it a look. Um, it's available wherever you buy your books and I would love to hear from anybody who gives it a read and wants to talk about it more.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Well, you just kinda jumped ahead, which is great, but I, I'll put links in the episode's description. Is there anything else you want, like websites you wanna mention or where people can follow you anywhere?

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. I'm, I'm on Blue Sky, Curtis Dozier on Blue Sky. And of course, check out my website, Pharaohs Doing Justice to the Classics at pharaohsclassics.org. I've been, I've been posting less there because I've been working on this book. But I, I have just written something about, I've got a couple of posts about Elon Musk. I just wrote something about.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Megyn Kelly, who's a very significant newscaster here. She referred to the Roman Empire in a, in a recent publication. Probably by the time this comes out, I hope I've got a article there about the giant sculpture of Prometheus that this tech bro has proposed building in San Francisco.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, who? I don't, I probably won't know him, but.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's not, he's, he's not known except for, for this. His name is Ross Calvin.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Oh, what a loser. I just.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's very clear, you can read his site, it's very clear that he sees this as a white nationalist project. And now I've got a section in my book about Prometheus as a symbol of, of white supremacy, as the kind of like embodiment of the claimed embodiment of the like, unique creativity and dynamism of white people. So, check out my site.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  You know, I'm just, to be honest, I hate to say this, I wish it wasn't true, but I'm just drowning in material. So, I hope I'll be able to get some of, some more examples of this up on the site. And there are links to, to find the book there, too, if you want. So, follow me on Blue Sky, take a look at the, take a look at my website at ferroshclassics.org. And I'd, I'd love to see you out there.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much. I, you did mention myth, though, and now I'm like, well, why wasn't I asking about myth? But I always assume, like, I'm just thinking about history and, and, and the reception. But, so, okay, Prometheus, of course, that's so yucky. So, before I let you go, have they latched on to any other, like, I mean, Prometheus feels very like, okay, like gross, but expected. But now I, I mean, even just for my own personal edification, because sometimes I don't know things about how mythological characters have been sort of transformed by the zeitgeist. But now I'm curious.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Wait, this, yeah, actually, when I was preparing for this, I was like, I need to think about the myths they use.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  So one thing I'll say, for a while on my site, I was trying to create sort of teaching materials for teachers who might like to incorporate some of what I'm doing on the site into their classes. And you can, there's a sidebar on the site, teaching resources. If you click on teaching resources on phariseclassics.org, there's a couple kind of selections of readings, and one of them is for Greek myth. So there's some examples there that you or your readers can find. Prometheus is one. The Odyssey is a big one. We did talk about that. They're very interested in Achilles, also, and the whole American Iliad. One thing that kind of surprised me is that there's not a ton of interest in Heracles. Interesting.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  And I actually, I will admit, here's a little behind the scenes thing, you can probably relate, as a book author, it wasn't until pretty late in the game that I worked on the book that I realized, that it sort of dawned on me, wait, no one's saying anything about Heracles. It's like, you can't see what's not there. Yeah. Until you step back a little bit. It might have even been when I was, I wasn't, it wasn't at the point where I was making the index, but I think I was kind of like thinking about the index. I was like, wait, there's not going to be anything for Heracles. Yeah. Who's a pretty major mythological figure. But I, so I dug around a little bit, there's a few references that I could find. And what it seems to me is that Heracles doesn't suit their politics very well, because he was such an individual. He wasn't doing

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  things for a community. Now, yeah, that, you know, that he was an individual, he sort of left this trail of destruction in his wake. So that's, in a way, a kind of thing that surprised me, too, was that Heracles didn't figure more significantly for them. But I, I sort of gathered that it...

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  That, you know, if what they're trying to say is that white people need to bond together and, you know, be proud of their identity and create like white communities to survive in a hostile world, Heracles doesn't fit that model very well. Like, the stories of Heracles don't, don't fit that. So, again, you know, they don't really, they care a ton about ancient Greece and Rome, but they only care about it insofar as it supports their, their politics. And so if, if something doesn't suit them, they just, you know, don't say very much about it.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's how you know they're nowhere, you know, it's so disconnected from the ancient world, because Heracles was it. Like, you know, it's, but it's so obviously, you know, picking and choosing what fits their disgusting narrative. And, yeah.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  And I'm glad you said picking and choosing, because if you want us, if, if we want to insist, or if we're committed to the view that they are distorting history, the way they, the way we can say they're distorting it is that they're picking and choosing, and that they're curating a view of antiquity, right? They leave out Heracles, but they leave out a ton more. They leave out all the work that's been done on marginalized voices, the experiences of women, the experience of enslaved people, right? You know, they're just, they don't say anything about that. Many of those that would, you know, complicate their view. They don't say anything about the, the Hellenistic

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  philosopher who, which is recorded in Josephus, I think, who said that actually the Jews and the Spartans have the same ancestor. There's, there's like an-

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Oh, they didn't like that?

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  There's an ancient claim about that, right? You don't find that on, you don't find that on white nationalist sources. They, they leave that out. So you can say they're curating antiquity, but the, the flip side to that, which I, which I always, I keep coming back to is, it's the same curation that the dominant approaches to-

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Greco-Roman antiquity do, right?

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  Most of the, most of the history of the study of the ancient world has left out women and marginalized voices.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, my degree is not even 15 years old and I didn't have any classes available.

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  Most professional classical scholars don't know that there's a, you know, a fragmentary author who said that the Jews and the Spartans have the same, the same ancestor. We're just like, like, we're not taught those things. And so, yes, they're curating it, but it's a curation that is perpetuated by the, by mainstream approaches to the, to the ancient world also.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  And so, you know, that again and again in the book, if I could name one kind of theme is I, you know, I kept coming back to this feeling as I was researching this material that what I thought was fringey and provocative and misappropriation and abusive, the harder I looked at it, the more I kept seeing similarities and entanglements with what was familiar to me as a, as a classical scholar.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm glad you were like, emphasized that point again, because I think that is, I mean, obviously the point of your book, but also like really important in the grand scheme of this world, you know, and classical, studying the classics and, and just generally being aware of it. Yeah, it's important to remember they're not just like making stuff up or changing things. They're just picking out the stuff that was there and maybe leaving out some other stuff, but yeah. Yeah, no, it's, now I'm having trouble wrapping up because it's just, it's so dark again, but also like, I'm so fascinated by this and I am always, you know, I'm very paying way too much attention to the news and, and, and everything that's happening. And so it's,

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know. It's, it's nice to chat with somebody else about it, I guess, is what I'm saying. So thank you so much.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  And I mean, and that's, that's really, that's really what it's about is, you know, if you are wondering, I mean, this is one thing I felt when I launched the site because it wasn't to change the minds of any the white supremacists, but it's kind of like, if you're wondering, If you feel uncomfortable, you listener or person out there, if you feel uncomfortable with the political entanglements of ancient Greece and Rome, but you also find yourself drawn to ancient Greece and Rome, which is a totally normal thing to feel, right? When it's so pervasive in our, in our country and there is so much fascinating about it. If you feel drawn and you're uncomfortable with the political entanglements, know that you are not alone. I mean, you, you already know that if you found this show, but.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, yeah, I've been doing this for eight years in different ways, but definitely I'm happy to have more forms of it.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  That's the way, that's the, that I think is the way that the work is not dark is that it's, I mean, it is, it's very dark, but it's, but it's like truth telling, right? And then truth telling is a form of, of bringing light to things, if I can continue the metaphor. And, and you know, being critical in this way, I think is actually a form of love for the material. So, so it's great that you're doing that on the show and it's great that your listeners are interested in that. And I'm very honored to be able to be here and share the way I'm approaching that with all of you.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Well, I'm so grateful to have you. Thank you again. This has been absolutely fascinating.

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  Thanks, Liv.

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is written and produced by Liv Albert, who is tired, I think, I don't know. I'm sick. It's the beginning of January, but she better be having a good time out there. Anyways, Michaela Panglish is the Hermes to all you Olympians, the producer, does other stuff, don't know what else right now. Select music by Luke Chaos. Thank you, Mr. Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, a collection of creators that all strive to bring you accurate and reliable information on the ancient world. These include the wonderful friends at Movies We Dig, the partial historians, Sweetbitter, and so much more. Get ad free episodes and more by subscription to the oracle edition on Patreon at patreon.com/MythsBaby via the

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  link in the episode's description. Lots of stuff over there on Patreon, not so much in the last week. We were both taking a break and disassociating into the distance as people with ADHD sometimes do. Anyways, if you are a scholar or someone in the field, we would absolutely love to have you on the show. Please visit the website, www.mitsmabye.com to find our contact form. We want to talk to you. We sure would love to have you on the show. Drop us a call, drop us a note. Anyways, yeah. Anyways, that's all for now. See you on Friday. Bye bye.

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